Armchair anthropology for the rest of us

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Monthly Archives: November 2011

I loathe dusting, so becoming a serious collector really doesn’t interest me at all. Instead of having a house full of tchotchkes, I’d much rather amass experiences. As a result, the only items I have multiples of are ticket stubs, bottles of sand, and matchbooks. While those three items may seem unrelated, I keep them around to remind me of events I’ve attended (ticket stubs), places I’ve been (sand), and adventures I’ve had (matchbooks).

I really have no idea what a sand collector is called, and ticket stub hoarders likely don’t have a name. But apparently the hobby of collecting matchbooks and matchbook-related items is known as phillumeny. It was so named in 1943 by British collector Marjorie Evans, and has (not really) taken the world by storm since then. While my matchbook collection is only in the double-digit range, Guinness World Record holder Emilio Arenas Florin of Uruguay has amassed 9130 unique matchbooks. So the answer is yes, there is a Guinness World Record for everything.

People are loyal to brands for numerous reasons, one of which is the sense of continuity they offer. For instance, if you have a bottle of Corona in Mexico, it’s pretty much guaranteed to taste the same as the one you consumed in Montreal or Dublin. Draft beer should follow the same rule: regardless of where you consume it, the beer on tap here will taste like the beer on tap there.*

One would assume the same goes for how intoxicated you’ll become from drinking draft: a pint is a pint, and the effect is the same regardless of where it is consumed. Right?

When deciding what courses to take in university, I knew that the overall goal was to pick a major that would actually get me a job someday. Nonetheless, I signed up for an Anthropology course just to see what it was all about. Fifty undergraduate courses later I had two Bachelor of Arts degrees – one that had a shot at landing me a job (Sociology) and one that didn’t have a snowball’s chance (Anthropology).

Sometimes you have to study what you love because you just can’t help yourself, career options be damned. Continue reading →